Ahead of President Obama’s trip to east Asia this weekend, things are heating up in the South China Sea. Reuters:

Two Chinese fighter jets carried out an “unsafe” intercept of a U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, drawing a rebuke from Beijing, which demanded that Washington end surveillance near China.

The incident, likely to increase tension in and around the contested waterway, took place in international airspace on Tuesday as the U.S. maritime patrol aircraft carried out “a routine U.S. patrol,” a Pentagon statement said.The encounter comes a week after China scrambled fighter jets as a U.S. Navy ship sailed close to a disputed reef in the South China Sea.

This is not the first such encounter: In 2014, a Chinese fighter approached a U.S. spy plane. But this latest confrontation comes after months of rising tensions as Beijing has accelerated its construction and fortification efforts in the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos. The U.S. has seemed more committed lately to putting pressure on Beijing, with the Pentagon clearly pushing the White House to be more assertive.

But China isn’t backing down, and U.S. officials expect Beijing to build even faster in the coming months. Clearly, whatever the White House has authorized thus far isn’t enough to give China much pause. On the other hand, directly challenging Beijing’s claims is exactly what the United States should be doing—especially having announced that it was committed to this course of action.

This is not the first such encounter: In 2014, a Chinese fighter approached a U.S. spy plane.
You don’t say! In 2001, a hotshot ChiCom fighter pilot, intent on zooming vertically directly in front of the cockpit of a USN P-3, misjudged the intercept just a wee bit, and collided with one of the P-3’s four turboprop engines. The ChiCom pilot was killed, and the P-3, in serious trouble, incredibly decided to land on ChiCom Hainan Island, surrendering all its classified material to the PRC forces that swarmed the plane.
For a wonderful sense of what the ChiComs consider belongs to them, and certainly not belongs to nearby Vietnam or Philippines or Indonesia, click on the map at the below link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea